beats & bytes, philosophy & games, code & culture

No thoughts, intentions or expectations. It’s not a doodle, if that implies being idle. It’s not a work of art, if that implies work. It’s what happened with my pen and paper while I was living in my body just now.

Since working on Racer and launching it a few people have said, ‘oh it’s like such and such a game’ but I’m yet to find something that is truely as unique as this AND is in a browser. Racer is a multi-player, multi-device Chrome Experiment. A retro-style slot car game played across screens. On phones or tablets, Android or iOS. Anyone can join. No apps. No downloads. Just the mobile web. It’s now up for The FWA Cutting Edge Project of the Year. If you think it deserves it please cast a vote!

Here’s Racer being demo’d at Google I/O 2013 – live demos are always nerve wracking, thankfully this one went smoothly.

Also awesome and cutting edge is that there’s also an installation version that runs on the same code base as the mobile game. The table was at Google I/O 2013 and another Google event ‘Zeitgeist’. Here’s a couple of pics of the table:

In addition to the table version, there are two flight case boxes containing a line up of mobile devices ready to play. This version also runs on the same code base. Here’s a pic of the cases and me demo’ing it at Cannes 2013 in the Google tent :

Pastor T.l. Barrett And The Youth For Christ Choir do their version of the traditional spiritual. Also check Louis Armstrong’s version. Edited: traditional spiritual, not Louis Armstrong original, thanks for the correction, @jedws.

DK played this on the latest Solid Steel, nothing like a sweet bit of gospel to wrap a set.

Philosophy has been an undercurrent of Strong Like Water since its inception but we have resisted tackling it because it tends to use a lot of words, time and frequently fails to reach satisfying conclusions.

That’s only because it’s so slippery.

The hairball that is philosophy seems to come from the lack of common ground and common words people use.

Philosophy is full of declaration of what things really are, of revelations of truth or of declarations of fallacy.

It seems to me that most of the topics in philosophy over time, especially questions about the nature of the physical world, which have reached satisfying consensus are those which have been taken over by science and have ceased to be philosophical questions. I will provide examples in a future post.

In fact some of my least satisfying moments in studying philosophy have been occasions where the speaker, writer, professor or drunken student interlocutor has been ignorant of the relevant scientific evidence that bears on the question being debated.

Philosophy walks a tightrope between science and mysticism.

The Strong Like Water philosophy is presented as a reflection of existing ideas from history and the present day, bundled and spun, maximized for fun and utility.

This is the way I hope to avoid using excess time and attention on your behalf and it’s a system you can use to keep me honest. Now let me clarify this “utility”.

Utility is usefulness, but without the assumption that the use is a great need. A buggy whip has utility because it can be put to work as a tool. When you drive your buggy to town, you give the horse a little signal with a flick of the wrist.

It’s not useful, however because nobody drives a buggy in the 21st century. A bike pump would be very useful but never more than when I have a flat tyre to inflate. Its utility is similar to its purpose, though not the same. Purpose implies design. Like purpose, however, a thing’s utility is unaffected by my need, while its usefulness is really where its utility and my needs align.

So to conclude this first post, I think the approach I recommend with philosophy, at least how I present it, is to consider this: what can I do with this philosophy? How does it change the possibilities I see before me if I adopt it?

It will sometimes be difficult to approach a novel or unfamiliar idea (which is where the pay dirt is) without resolving all the inconsistencies that it infers when trying to incorporate all the many thoughts that seem to fight for the same mental real estate. But do you need to resolve them for it to be fun or have utility?

If you can fall back to the yardsticks of utility and fun, you can cut straight to the chase: is it worth thinking about?

Coding is so powerful because it’s essentially formless, like water. It’s creative and it’s robust. Code is the most tangible form that logical thought can take, and when that ghost is let loose in a machine, magic happens.

If you can patiently break down a problem and build up a solution with very tiny parts, fragments of thoughts, you can program a computer to do anything you can imagine.

Code.org is a new non-profit created to promote computer science education in the US. Why is code not just an irrelevant geeky niche?

It turns out you should stop listening to your aunts and uncles tell you that all those “programming jobs” are going to India and recognise that software has been going gangbusters while the rest of the first world industries complain about hard times.

A new car ships with more lines of code than Microsoft Windows.

Check out Mark Zuckerberg and Bill Gates and plenty of others who have changed the world with code.

Originally published on Hessle in 2008, this is absolutely the best thing for clearing the bugs and dust out of the bass bins. At decent volumes, this bassline is probably fairly good at unscrewing any nuts and bolts not glued in place.

Protip: if you want a good sound out of a youtube clip, make sure you use HD videos. The audio quality is generally matched to the video quality.

I’m listening to this right now on a pair of Shure SRH440 closed headphones which I can highly recommend for the price as long as your ears are not particularly big or protuberant (unfortunately mine are both).

If your budget or ears are bigger, you might go for these:

But then again, for working in a distracting environment or long flights, I’m most impressed by these:

In the interests of full disclosure, if you follow my advice and/or links on these headphones I stand to get a kickback and that would be much appreciated.

Empty your mind, be formless. Shapeless, like water. If you put water into a cup, it becomes the cup. You put water into a bottle and it becomes the bottle. You put it in a teapot it becomes the teapot. Now, water can flow or it can crash. Be water my friend.